Sunday, May 02, 2010

Barbary Coast Bunny 2

The setup is over and now the actual story starts. First Chuck establishes the mood and location. Robert Gribbroek drew these beautiful layouts and Phil De Guard painted them. Nice clear compositions and unusual color schemes.I love this establishing shot of the interior of the casino. It shows how huge it is in comparison with Nasty way over on the right. The BG is full of design contrasts: The curved winding stairway, the tall vertical window that frames a tiny Nasty at his desk. Organic sinuous chairs, low in the frame contrasted against tall vertical designs on the walls. It's all intelligently planned to tell the story and be striking and beautiful at the same time. Very stylish, without being garish.Nasty is funny here; we see him marking the cards with those stubby fingers Chuck loves.Nasty is not as exaggerated as he becomes later in the cartoon. Chuck got more comfortable with the design as he worked his way through the cartoon and he kept drawing more complex variations of him. This could not happen if he was bound to some arbitrary model sheet rules created in another department by people he didn't know.An almost ignorant shot of the swinging doors to contrast against the previous elegant layouts.This straight on symmetrical ignorance helps to establish that Bugs is a hick coming to the big city. I like how we don't se him all at once. We just see the hick shoes coming in first. Good suspense.Nice touches here. Chuck is teasing us by not just showing us Bugs all at once.The wheat straw in Bugs mouth says it all.Robert Gribbroek is my favorite of Chuck's designers. He has a perfect balance between creativity and control. He doesn't let creative license turn into outright anarchy, like you see in many of today's cartoons.

30 comments:

even that one nearly ignorant background had a great view out onto the urban sprawl that contrasts so well with the false opulence of the casino. It shows that the whole town is full of hicks and that the casino is the 'floating cloud' within it.

One silly question, but did Jones say this character was Nasty Canasta? I just rewatched Drip A Long Daffy and the Nasty Canasta character in that cartoon is a lot more different in design and voice than I remembered.

I love how the layout artist, the director, and the BG painter worked so well together to create all these very stylish, yet controlled compositions. I think something like this would definitely be impossible in the modern animation production system, especially since a huge chunk of it would be sent overseas out of pure laziness (a lot of these modern cartoons have so much money funded into them, I don't see why they couldn't do more of the shows in house).

Someone really needs to bring the idea of making short 7 minute theatrical cartoons back. Then there would be no excuse from the executes for the animation or the layouts to be outsourced to Korea or Taiwan or any of those places.

Hey John. Fun post. This is one of my favorites as a kid growing up. I love the "bigger hand" gag later in the cartoon. I love the design of Canasta in this cartoon as more of a lummox but I did get confused as to why his character changed design and character to the Nasty Canasta from "Drip-A-Long Daffy" in 1951. He was more of a evil villain than a goof ball. Take care..

I think this is maybe my second favorite from Chuck. I like "The Rabbit of Seville" the most. I never knew why I liked this one but I like the other from all the singing. I hope you analyze "The Rabbit of Seville" too

These BGs, especially the wide interior of the casino, show the kind of techniques that we are supposed to learn in those art schools. The use of negative space, warm colors against cools, curves against straights; they all play to 3-D design, color theory, and graphic arts.

Just imagine a 7 min theatrical cartoon made in america in place of those god awful commercials and previews. the movie experience would become a lot more fun. It must have been amazing to go to a movie and see a three stooges short, or a bugs bunny cartoon. Something like that now days.....well its a nice dream.

"Just imagine a 7 min theatrical cartoon made in america in place of those god awful commercials and previews. the movie experience would become a lot more fun. It must have been amazing to go to a movie and see a three stooges short, or a bugs bunny cartoon. Something like that now days.....well its a nice dream."

I think even if there was a market for theatrical cartoons today (surprised there isn't anymore), the theaters would still cram the movie screen with junk no one would wanna watch in the first place, just like on television, like those commercials and dumb previews. Something that should be common sense to the higher management. I still have hope myself, but there's always a catch to having anything fun and decent making it on the screen, as we've seen over and over again.